Pages

Saturday, September 5, 2015

Systems Saturday - Euphoria: Build a Better Dystopia (2013)

Our friend Wendy has been mentioning that she wanted to get Euphoria: Build a Better Dystopia (2013) on the tabletop recently so we broke it out for our Friday at Culver's yesterday. It's a fine looking game with lots of components and busy, but not too busy, colorful game board.

The description from Board Game Geek is as follows:

In Euphoria: Build a Better Dystopia, you lead a team of workers (dice) and recruits (cards) to claim ownership of the dystopian world. You will generate commodities, dig tunnels to infiltrate opposing areas, construct markets, collect artifacts, strengthen allegiances, and fulfill secret agendas.

Euphoria is a worker-placement game in which dice are your workers. The number on each die represents a worker's knowledge—that is, his level of awareness that he's in a dystopia. Worker knowledge enables various bonuses and impacts player interaction. If the collective knowledge of all of your available workers gets too high, one of them might desert you. You also have two elite recruit cards at your disposal; one has pledged allegiance to you, but the other needs some convincing. You can reveal and use the reticent recruit by reaching certain milestones in the game... or by letting other players unwittingly reach those milestones for you.

Your path to victory is paved with the sweat of your workers, the strength of your allegiances, and the tunnels you dig to infiltrate other areas of the world, but the destination is a land grab in the form of area control. You accomplish this by constructing markets that impose harsh restrictions of personal freedoms upon other players, changing the face of the game and opening new paths to victory. You can also focus on gathering artifacts from the old world, objects of leisure that are extremely rare in this utilitarian society. The dystopian elite covet these artifacts—especially matching pairs—and are willing to give you tracts of land in exchange for them.

Four distinct societies, each of them waiting for you to rewrite history. What are you willing to sacrifice to build a better dystopia?

There is a lot to keep track of in this game, and I like that. Watch out for the penalties for not being part of the construction of a market, it can delay your ongoing plans, repeatedly. Keep your minds weak and hearts warm for a better chance at victory and don't wait too long to get up to the clouds. This one will definitely see a lot of play around these parts. Great fun!